This is an announcement. I am currently working with the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education on a project to research the marketing of university press books. The project is supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The aim is to determine what university presses can do to enhance their marketing and [...]

     Digital media present intriguing growth opportunities for book publishers, but in some instances digital media may interfere with certain market channels. Developing digital marketing strategies requires a great deal of thought. It is important to resist the temptation of “digital millennialism” and assume that “If it’s digital, it must be good.” If not managed [...]

     The Kindle is a watershed event in electronic publishing.  It is not the first ebook device, and it may not ultimately be the one that will prevail (it could of course be one of several). But its appearance marks the point where ebooks move from theory to actuality.  Whether the leading device is the [...]

A recent announcement by Knowledge Exchange appeared on Yale’s liblicense mailgroup. It describes an innovative collaborative project by which universities and governmental sponsors work together in purchasing formally published material in order to reduce costs and improve access to scholars of the member communities. Way back in 2005 I posted a proposal, also to liblicense, [...]

On one side we have user-generated content (UGC), exemplified by Wikipedia; on the other we have traditional publishing, which is characterized by an editor or series of editors (acquiring editor, developmental editor, copy editor, production editor), who review submitted material and make judgments as to its shape, argument, and suitability for publication. UGC is on [...]

The Inside Higher Education link that Peter Brantley recently sent to a list, regarding the open-access Museum Anthropology Review, reminded me of some distinctions I like to make, when given the opportunity, about the culture of journals vs. the cultures of books. It pertains to the drivers of the different products, and the people who [...]

Michael Cader was kind enough to alert me to a Forbes story about Nike http://www.forbes.com/sportsbusiness/forbes/2008/0211/082.html This demonstrates another aspect of a theme I think is the dominant reality of how media is changing, from the 20th century’s “horizontal and format specific” to the 21st century’s “vertical and format agnostic.” The post explains that Nike used [...]